Today feels like a good day on which to speak of balance. I've been leading up to it for weeks. 

If there is a virtue that informs all of the others, it must be balance. A balance of courage and wisdom motivates us toward hard work. The athlete that loves to compete and really wants to win studies his sport, his competition, and his own body, and then forms a well-designed training schedule which is filled mostly with hard work. So also the armies that want to win, and the entrepreneurs. In the end, it is the work that they remember the most vividly, and with a quiet sense of satisfaction, no matter how many times they won or lost or how many people knew their names. 

Love in balance with wisdom produces honesty. If we love people, we treat them as we would like to be treated ourselves. And which of us wants to be lied to? I recognize in no one a moral right to guide my life. And that's what lying amounts to. If my butt looks grotesque in these gym shorts, then tell me so. If I can't take what you deem to be the truth, then it is time I grew up and did learn to hear it. I can disagree with you. I can wear them anyway because they're comfortable, and the hell with the way they look to other people. But I value that you tell me what you really think. I can't learn and grow by our relationship as two independent human beings if we have any other policy between us.

And the balance of love and freedom is respect. The respectful balance produces a pluralistic society, one in which different kinds of people all live together and get along. The balance of courage and freedom is self-esteem. Not vanity, but true pride. Knowing you're worthy as an individual and believing that you can do things, set goals and realize them, and live day by day decently. 

In short, even at the highest levels of organization, the whole of society, the whole picture of the human race, the whole living community of the earth, and the particles of the universe, balance is the virtue that rules all of the others. The tao, if you like, which is the idea of balance that made sense to millions in the East for thousands of years, and informed all that they did, from peasants to emperors.   

The scary thing for us in this twenty first century is that we can look back and see that for centuries, balance has been achieved in the human community of the earth by war. We have been our own predators for a long time. We don't eat corpses. Cannibalism has been considered taboo in almost all societies for a long time. But we do cut out the obsolete parts of our total cultural pool by war, and we have done so for a long time. Note also that no conqueror justifies his conquests by saying to his followers, "Those other people are weak. They deserve to be wiped out because they're weak." The rationale is always that the others are evil, savage, sub-human, and that we must get them before they get us because it's obvious that our two societies cannot coexist. So we fight, one side defeats the other, and the losers are re-programmed by the winners to a different culture and a different way of life. The contest is cultural, not racial, and the outcome leads to one culture taking in more territory and members as the other shrinks. 

Now the full picture is more nuanced than the above description captures. Vanquished cultures only rarely disappear altogether, and even when their adherents bow to another culture, the people hardly ever lose their cultural identity - language, artistic traditions, education system, laws, and so on - entirely. But the picture given above of balance in the human community is good enough for the purposes of this post. The ways of extending the idea of balance in real life can be worked out by each reader for him or herself. 

What scares us today is that on the global scale we can't afford to use war as the means of finding balance and determining which cultures should rise and which should fade anymore. Our weapons have gotten too big. The logical question that comes next is, "How do we replace war?" War kept humanity strong for eons. It was ugly, but it served a larger purpose. If we try to eliminate war, will we simply get weaker and sicker, generation after generation, until our cultural vigor fizzles out and we become like the deer on the island where there are no predators? Such cases have occurred in our records of natural history. Populations that have no survival pressures applied to them at all do keep getting weaker. Then when a challenge like a new microbe comes into the population, they die out in one generation to the last individual. 

But I maintain on this page that we can use our intelligence and do better. We can replace war and still remain vigorous and even become more so. And we can learn to live in harmony with nature.  

Sport is a simple, clear example of an activity that aims to do exactly that - replace war in a socially manageable way. There are rules. There is a referee. Sportsmanship as a value to be aimed at guides the players to strive to win not just within the letter of the laws of the game, but the spirit of those laws. Fair play for the love of the game. Yes, rules differ from sport to sport as mores differ from society to society. But excellent wrestlers in another context can be excellent rugby players, or basketball players, or chess players or actors or public speakers, for that matter. 

The managing of the human competitive instincts that we have had programmed into us by nature for centuries will be complex, but that managing is not impossible. The moral crisis that we now face because we have used our brains to make such terrible weapons is demanding of us that we learn to not use those weapons. 

We are going to have to learn to intelligently redirect our darkest instincts into useful and productive activities. Sport, business, the arts, science. And the danger that some frustrated maniac will push that nuclear weapons button is always there. But who ever told you life could be made completely safe? Find that fool and kick his ass. 

What we can do is work very hard for whole lifetimes to get people to think about morals, to take responsibility for their actions and words and strive every day to make a better world. A respectful, wise, courageous one. And most of all, to teach the kids that there is inherent worth in every other human being, no matter that person's race, religion, gender, or abilities. 

Tough, smart, motivated, decent kids. Ones who will look back at us and smile, thinking that we were well-intentioned, but so feeble and naive. Of course, life can be managed and enjoyed. Why did our grandparents find that so difficult? 

Mutualistic relationships exist in nature by the millions, just as much as predator-prey ones do. The crucial difference between us and the rest of the animal world is that we can manage our relationships intelligently. We can learn to employ more and more nuance in our dealings with nature and with each other. If we have the smarts to make terrible weapons, we also have the smarts not to use them. 

A better world. Hard. Not impossible. And with the internet working for us, getting a little more believable every day.      

                                          Mutualism: plover cleaning teeth of Nile crocodile 

                                                       fish cleaning sea turtle's shell of parasites